


oceans and skies

by deniigiq



Series: Into the Multiverse [12]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Anxiety, Friendship, Introspection, Leadership, Loneliness, Peter struggles with being a person twice mutated, this is a Blond Peter Parker isn't dead fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 21:55:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21106625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Are you okay?” Miles asked him.Peter smiled.“I’m great,” he said.Miles didn’t believe him for a second.(Miles finds Blondie way up high, trying to come back to himself before going home to MJ. He realized how badly he's struggling to adjust to being alive again.)





	oceans and skies

**Author's Note:**

> Just as a note, Peter = Blondie/Blond Peter in this fic. 
> 
> I would recommend reading **under fire** in order to understand his whole twice-mutated thing, but if you don't want to, you do you boo. 
> 
> Also I have discussed the dynamics of this particular team red in **Sidebars** in the Inimitable verse, the last chapter here if you don't want to read the whole thing but want to know why Blondie and Wade in this verse don't get on: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18990733/chapters/48818726 
> 
> References to evasive behavior, major anxiety, and grief below. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

Miles had known Peter properly for six months now. ‘Properly’ as in, he knew more about Peter than just his name and the general philosophy he used to guide himself.

They spent more time together than Miles would have expected, seeing as Peter was really only a part-time resident of any one universe these days. Sometimes it was just a casual, nonchalant bump in the street followed by a knowing wink. Sometimes it was hours upon hours chasing after perps, tracking and planning and cooking up counterschemes of their own to really give those bad guys a taste of their own medicine.

So it was no surprise now that Miles knew that Peter had some problems which he was hiding from everyone as best as he could.

The Avengers, for example were part of that everyone. Mary Jane was, too. Matt, for certain.

And oddly enough, Miles.

Peter was hiding something from Miles. Miles knew this because Peter was awful at the job.

He was like a naughty puppy; if you took a tone with him, he dropped his big, blue eyes and lowered his chin and occasionally glanced back up at you to see if you were still mad, and if yes, how much. He unwittingly betrayed himself in doing that.

People who had nothing to be guilty about wouldn’t look so guilty.

At first, Miles thought that Peter thought that he was still mad at him for being a jerk to DP. He was not wrong. Miles was still mad at him for being a jerk to DP because someone had to be and DP didn’t care enough about any of them, including himself, to bother being that guy.

They were working on it.

Matt was working on DP and Miles was working on Peter and by next year, the two of them hoped, they could bridge the gap between those other two enough that they could be in the same area without immediately launching into a senseless argument.

Part of bridging that gap involved getting Peter to realize that the relationship that he’d had with Matt prior to his death was never going to be the same as the one they had now and being mad at DP about that wasn’t helpful or productive for anyone. Matt had mourned Peter. Matt had mourned Peter_ twice_. The first time was after Peter had gotten married to MJ and his and Matt’s relationship was, as far as MJ and society in general was concerned, officially over and done with. That case was closed, to be opened again only by death or divorce. The second time Matt had mourned Peter was when the city had delivered what was supposed to be his body in a box to his local synagogue.

Matt had suffered so much already from his love for Peter, and while he was still willing to carry it as a part of his heart, he told Miles, he had to only let it be a part.

Yeah, he was messing around with DP now, but he got embarrassed when Miles brought it up and explained that it was only that.

Just messing around.

“I’m waiting for someone,” Matt told Miles in barely more than a whisper.

“It’s not that I don’t love Peter,” Matt told him. “I’d do anything for him; it’s just that I’ve never done anything good for me, I don’t think. And I’ve got a feeling that this time? It’ll work out. I’ll make it work.”

Peter’s heart didn’t feel or work the same way as most peoples’. Miles knew that perhaps better than Peter wanted him to.

It was silly, honestly. It really was.

Miles had spoken to other Peter Parkers. He’d worked with them, the tall and the short. And the vast majority of them had only a few things in common: brown hair, no fear of heights, a truly abysmal sense of self-worth, a truly incredible sense of self-sacrifice, and a dramatic lean in the polyamorous direction of things.

That was Peter Parker. All of them—well, most of them. Well, _a lot_ of them. Peter B was polyamorous. Tats was. Miles suspected the trouble-twins Shortstack and Funsize were; he could only suspect, though, because Shortstack had this thing where he could only spend about two hours in another Spiderman’s presence before he tried to fight them to the death, which made talking to him after any fighting was done with challenging. Funsize, on the other hand, flat out refused to engage in any discussion of crushes, sexuality, or gender at all. When pressed, he said that he was a weird, sort-of witch and that was his entire identity and no, he wasn’t taking questions and sorry, he suddenly had business to attend to.

So maybe Miles wasn’t working with a whole lot of data here, but he was pretty sure that Peter was polyamorous and trying to hide it.

Miles had brought it up once and Peter had said that he supported him wholeheartedly, whatever he decided his identity was, which was both clever as hell and annoying as shit.

Miles wasn’t sure if he was polyamorous yet, he was reserving judgment for a later date and he didn’t appreciate Peter shifting the focus like that. But Peter had problems that he wasn’t telling anyone about and he was allowed to have them and he was allowed to hide them, so Miles backed off and complained to Matt, as he always did.

Matt was a sympathetic ear, because, as he liked to say, he couldn’t be a sympathetic eye.

He wasn’t funny, Matt. No one had the heart to tell him.

Matt eventually told Miles, firstly, that Miles led with his right and his form was absolute dog shit, and secondly, that Peter wasn’t acting quite the same way that he had before he’d died.

That was more than understandable. But Matt carried on to say that Peter had had problems with anxiety the whole time they’d known each other and that they’d finally been settling down before Miles found him that unfortunate first time.

Anxiety was anxiety, however.

The man that Miles and Matt now bopped around with and teased and laughed with, Matt said, was just so, so sad.

So unbelievably sad. So uncharacteristically sad and quiet and soft and isolated.

Miles didn’t understand that last thing. As far as he could tell, Peter had never had more friends. He had Spidermen from all over the multiverse in his circle these days; they loved Peter. He was friendly, he was helpful, he was strong and skilled and prepared to throw everything he had and knew behind them when they needed it.

“Yeah,” Matt pointed out, “But he’s always got to go back to the In-Between now.”

Which was true. He did.

Miles didn’t know when Peter went back into the In-Between, but he knew that it was at least two or three times a week. He started to glitch if he didn’t. He got lethargic. He started sleeping a lot. He got cold and pale and started to lose focus over and over again.

The Avengers were monitoring his health, as was SHIELD. Both orgs kept close tabs on him, although he was naturally inclined to be slippery and to hide from them as much as he possibly could. He wasn’t supposed to be Spiderman in this verse unless either of those groups specifically gave him permission to be.

Not that he kept to that.

Court agreements didn’t count in the In-Between and Peter hadn’t cut any deals with any judges or DAs in alternate New Yorks.

Still though, spending time in the In-Between and alternate New Yorks two to three days a week meant that Peter only lived in his own home verse about 50% of the time, and while he was here, he was policed heavily.

Matt thought that the half-time living and full-time surveillance made him feel like he couldn’t be as close to the people who he once had been. Everyone knowing who he was and what he’d done had also divided his friend group into factions.

There were the people who still supported him, even after being lied to for years and years on end. And there were the other folks, whose trust had been broken and who didn’t know if they could stay friends with someone who was so two-faced and violent and who broke the law day in and day out.

Peter let them go. He was grateful to those who stayed, but now, Matt thought, he felt like he was in debt to them for their kindness.

Equality was a thing of the past for Peter. And that made him sad and quiet and different from who he’d been before.

He was searching for something, Miles thought. But he didn’t know what, and he wasn’t sure if Peter did either.

Miles found what it was when the first big rain of fall was upon them and Peter was home. He’d climbed up high in his street clothes to be thrown around in the wind. He sat on the edge of a crane with his coat tossing wildly around him and his pale face lit by the bright high beams from below.

He couldn’t be Spiderman at the moment, but he always would be, even when he was just a young dude, sitting up high, swinging his heels back and forth in the cold.

When Miles swung up in a huge sideways arc past him, he held out one of his hands for Miles to high-five on his way to the Bronx.

On the way home, two hours later, Peter was still sitting up there, being buffeted.

He felt Miles coming in from behind him in a tight swing and opened his eyes.

In them Miles saw the In-Between.

They were oceans and galaxies all at once. They glowed and shined like the city lights. Like ambulance sirens and fireflies all at once. The blues and light slipped and slid over each other like mercury and for a second, Peter’s pupils were so small it was like they weren’t even there.

He caught Mile’s hand this time and pulled him up onto the crane with him.

His eyes kept on dancing.

“Are you okay?” Miles asked him.

Peter smiled.

“I’m great,” he said.

Miles didn’t believe him for a second.

“Are you coming or going?” he tried, sitting down next to him. Peter moved his jacket out of the way to make room.

“Coming,” Peter said. “Not ready to go home yet.”

For two hours, friend? You haven’t been ready for two hours?

Peter carried on smiling. It was a cold one. Miles understood now why.

Peter was twice-mutated now; once from the spider, once from Doc Ock. His humanity was stretched to its absolute limit. Unwittingly, in trapping him in the space between all the universes to make him scream, Doc Ock had made him part of it.

His body morphed to match it when he was in it; it got cold and quiet and full of little but sparks and endless darkness. It was as though Peter himself became a mirror or a membrane through which you could see the wonders of the world: light, water, and darkness.

He knew a peace which no one else could.

“It scares MJ,” Peter finally said. “The eyes. The pulse. She says I feel dead and she can’t touch me; you know, she already had to once.”

Horrible. That was horrible.

“So you wait until it wears off?” Miles asked.

“It takes a while sometimes,” Peter told him. “Sometimes an hour, sometimes four or five.”

“What do you do when its four or five?” Miles asked.

Peter shrugged.

“I go home to May,” he said. “It doesn’t bother her as much. But she’s sleeping and I don’t want to bother her tonight.”

He leaned back on his palms and closed his eyes through another gust of wind which rattled the zipper on his coat.

“Peter,” Miles asked. “What’s really wrong?”

Peter opened his eyes and the oceans inside them started to sink so that they could turn into shiny tears at his bottom waterlines.

“Nothing,” he choked.

“Peter,” Mile said. “Let me help you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. You’re crying.”

Peter laughed. He wiped at his face with his sleeve.

“Maybe I’m just tired,” he said.

Maybe you’re lonely.

“I’ll be okay tomorrow. It’s probably just some kind of latent anxiety. I’ve got a checkup on Friday. I’ll ask for more meds.”

Maybe you’re scared.

“Don’t worry about me, Miles,” Peter said, reaching over and scrubbing at the top of Mile’s head through his mask. “I’m Spiderman. I’ll be okay.”

Maybe you’re drowning in all those oceans and skies in your eyes.

“Hey, why don’t you head home, kiddo? It’s pretty late. You’ve got school tomorrow don’t you?”

“Peter, why don’t you let me be Spiderman?” Miles offered.

He got a frown in return.

“Miles, you are Spiderman,” he said.

“No,” Miles said, “Why don’t you let me be your Spiderman?”

Peter tried to smile his confusion away.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Miles told him. “I was just thinking that you’ve got a lot of responsibility and stuff, being the multiverse Spidey. Like, everywhere you go, you’ve gotta be the guy in charge to help the other guys figure it out, don’t you? That seems exhausting already. But then you come home and you’ve got all these expectations on you and all these rules and things about what you can and can’t do and that’s gotta be extra, super frustrating on top of being exhausting. So I just thought, why don’t you let me take the lead when you’re home? That way you don’t have to think. You don’t have to be in control or to be ready to take on the world. You can leave that to me.” Miles popped a thumb back at himself. “And then you can decide if you want to be Peter Parker or Spiderman when you’re home and we can say that it’s not your fault, either way you decide. I’m the lead.”

Peter stared at him for a second and then huffed a laugh. He pressed his sleeve to his cheekbone.

“It’s a nice thought, Miles,” he said. “Thank you.”

“But?” Miles wheedled.

Peter looked away, down into the jagged blocks that were buildings below.

“But the Avengers wouldn’t go for that,” Peter sighed. “Or SHIELD. I’m supposed to be under their official command. They wouldn’t give that up for me to work under another Spiderman. I’m too useful.”

Even Miles could taste the bitterness of that final word.

Miles shifted a little closer to Peter’s side, practically huddled up in his jacket with him.

“You don’t know that,” he said. “We might have a shot. I mean, you’re not a shovel. You’re a person.”

Peter glanced back at him but didn’t move away from the contact.

“They want me because I’m a specimen,” he said, “It’s not just about the fighting, Miles. They want to know what else I can do.”

Hm.

“But you’re not a thing, Peter,” Miles repeated.

One of Peter’s oceans started slipping down his cheek.

“I am, though,” he admitted. He put his sleeve in the ocean’s path but didn’t wipe it away as viciously as before.

“I’m a dead man walking,” he said. “I’m part of the ether; maybe even black matter. And it’s like everyone else has moved forward, Miles, but I’m stuck there, back there, in the dark. Behind them all.”

He breathed out shakily.

“I wasn’t meant to come back to this place,” he said. “And I can’t ask people to wait for me to catch up. They’ve already been through enough. They have to look at my face and be cheated of their grief. So I’ve just gotta learn how to deal with it all. That’s all. I’ve just gotta learn to cope, and it’s only been half of a year, right? Maybe in a year, things’ll be different and easier and I can catch up.”

Miles brought up a knee to rest his cheek on. He swung his other leg back and forth over the crane’s side.

“Peter,” he finally said. “It’s gonna be okay. You already know how to fall. You’ve just gotta remember how to fly.”

Peter put a hand over his face and choked on a real sob, probably one that he’d been holding back for ages now. He brought his own knees up back onto the crane and pressed his forehead into them.

Miles’s mom, at this point, would have put a hand on his back and rubbed it in big circles, but Miles’s hands weren’t as big as hers quite yet and he got the feeling that Peter couldn’t stand for more touching at the moment. It was too much. Everything was already too much.

Peter forced himself to take in a deep breath and then another and another, each slower than the last, until he wasn’t shaking so bad anymore.

“I just miss Ben,” he finally creaked. “I thought—I thought I’d wake up one day and see him. I thought that when I died, he’d meet me. Every time I go back to the In-Between, it’s like I can hear him. It’s so real, Miles. He raised me, Miles. He didn’t have to, he and May never had to. But they did and now I’m not even their fuckin’ kid anymore. I’m just this—I’m just a _thing_. A freak of nature. What if I can’t die, now, Miles? What if I’ll never see Ben again? What if something happens and I mutate even more and I’m just so cold all the time? And MJ can’t touch me? What if I have to watch her and you and everyone I know die?”

Miles closed his eyes. His throat was too tight to answer.

He knew none of that would happen, though. Because one of these days, Peter would spend too long in their universe or someone else’s. It was inevitable. He’d stay maybe just ten, maybe twenty seconds too long. And then he’d get tired and glitchy and he’d fall asleep and he’d be too quiet for anyone to notice. And then he’d glitch and fade away, wherever he was. 

And still, no one would know. Not for a long time, probably. They’d all just be waiting for him to come home. Or to come back from where he was hiding. Or to wake up from that nap.

Whether that was tomorrow or twenty or a hundred years from now was anyone’s guess, but Miles knew for sure that Peter wasn’t immortal.

Even the multiverse couldn’t be that cruel.

“You’ll see him again,” he finally managed to make himself say through the tightness in his throat.

Peter sniffed.

“Your uncle,” Miles clarified. “You’ll see him again. And MJ would get used to it. She’d be scared the first couple of times, but she loves you. So she’d get used to whatever happened to you, _if _anything ever happened. And even if it does take you a long time to die or something, that means that you get to watch me and Matt get old and grumpy. You couldn’t have done that six months ago, right?”

Peter swallowed and dabbed at his face.

“I guess,” he relented.

Miles unfolded himself a bit.

“And if your old friends don’t like you anymore, Peter, fuck ‘em. Get new ones. No sense in spending all this time grieving after ‘em if they’ve already left you behind, right?”

“Right,” Peter said, staring back into Miles’s eyes now. His irises had stopped shifting. They had shadows in them again, and mostly-solid color from a distance.

Miles peeled off his mask and smiled.

“And anyways, we all still love you,” he said. “Me and Matt and MJ and May—hey, look at all the ‘m’s you’ve got lined up!”

Peter laughed this time and scrubbed harder at his face.

“You’re right, you’re right,” he said, muffled by the movement.

Miles beamed out over the steel cliffs of the city and kicked his legs out into a wide stretch. He leaned back on the heels of his palms.

“So what do you say?” he asked. “You want to be my second?”

“Second Spiderman?” Peter scoffed.

“That’s right. Team Lead, Miles Morales,” Miles said. “We all get matching sneakers, even DP. He’ll say they’re impractical, but we’ll out number him when we tell him they look cool. Matt’ll go along with it. As long as they’re red, you know he’s down. And we’ll make ‘em his confidence shoes, so when he finally gets ready to bite the bullet and ask Foggy out, he’ll have an extra confidence boost. And when we inevitably meet the Peter who looks just like you, we’ll have a way to tell you apart—like Shortstack and Funsize, but with less death-instinct.”

Peter’s grin got wider and wider the longer he listened, and Miles knew he was letting himself really consider it because he didn’t interrupt, not once.

“You’re a good friend, Miles,” he said.

“Well, duh,” Miles said, rolling his eyes. “I’m Spiderman, dude. We’re the best friends anyone could ask for.”

Peter barked a laugh and slung himself out of his ball to mimic Miles’s pose.

“I’ve never been a second before,” he said. “Ironman’s not gonna like it.”

“We can take him.”

“Cap, either. He’s trying to groom me to be the next lead for the incoming generation of Avengers, did I tell you that?”

“It’s ‘cause you’re bursting with potential. Don’t worry, we’ll fight him, too.”

When Peter laughed this time, it sounded loud and loose.

“Okay, I’ll let ‘em know that I got a new boss,” he said. “Should I submit a resignation letter?”

“Oh, definitely,” Miles said. “Do one to SHIELD, too.”

“I hated being an Avenger,” Peter revealed.

“That’s what B says.”

“Don’t tell him he’s right.”

“What’re you gonna do about your court stuff?” Miles asked.

Peter hummed.

“Dunno,” he said, “But I know a great lawyer. He might have some ideas.”


End file.
